Turtlebot_Teleop not Working Properly

After we ssh into the turtlebot and roslaunch turtlebot_teleop keyboard_teleop.launch the program begins working, but when we press the keys, the turtlebot does not respond. It displays changes in velocity, so we know that it is registering our key presses, but the robot remains stationary.

We even borrowed another turtlebot from someone else working in the lab to make sure it wasn't our robot, but could not get it to work on his either.

When I echo /cmd_vel it displays linear and angular coordinates, so the information is definitely being published, but when I look at the rxgraph of everything, the /turtlebot_teleop_keyboard is only linked to /rosout.

Shouldn't it also be communicating with something else in order to send its messages to the robot?

Karthik,

I will try this out later today and let you know how it goes. Thank you again for your help!

March 26 Update

I tested all the network connections and everything is fine, but turtlesim is not installed on the laptop, so I could not test that.

So I believe my problem stems from the nodes not correctly publishing or subscribing. In my rxgraph, the turtlebot_teleop_keyboard node is publishing a cmd_vel topic but the turtlebot_node is not subscribing to it. When I click on the turtlebot_node it says "Subscriptions: none". When I do rosnode info turtlebot_node it says

Subscriptions:
* /turtlebot_node/cmd_vel [unknown type]

so it looks like there is conflicting info. I am unsure what to do to fix this.

There is no real "error", the robot just does not respond to keystrokes. The output on the screen shows that the program is responding to the keystrokes, but the robot itself does not move. It led us to believe it was a problem with our robot, but we tried another robot it would not move either.

The dashboard is working perfectly (everything is green), and we can even visualize things with the kinect in rviz. We were hoping to have some fun with gmapping, but without teleop we have no way to really drive it around. Thank you again for any suggestions.

4 answers

The default topic for the cmd_vel changed as you discovered. It looks like you might be running code of different versions of the release on your different machines. You can fix it by using topic remapping until you update one or both machines.

I have had this issue myself. For some reason, the turtlebot_teleop only likes to work when the keyboard is connected to the actual turtlebot. I would try using a program called Synergy to share your keyboard with the turtlebot. Once you share it, you should open a terminal on the turtlebot laptop and run the teleop. Use Synergy to share the keyboard at your workstation with the robot. Hope it works!